A number of reports have appeared, most by one person, that purport to show an ability to identify cancer patients by specific handwriting characteristics at a microscopic level, presumably evidence of neuromuscular dysfunction associated with cancer. The claimed power of discrimination was very high. Some questions about the possibility of non-blind experimentation left a cloud over the validity of the reported findings. This study was intended to test the claim with rigorous, blind analysis of handwriting samples, code-breaking done by persons other than the writing analysts, and between- and within-analyst reliability trials. The finding of 60% and 58% correct overall for 50 cancer and 50 non-cancer specimens were significantly different from chance (p less than .05) when X2's for the two readers were added. However, the unreliability, both within and between readers, tended to nullify a conclusion of successful discrimination. In spite of the possibility that a few specimens (theoretically, 16 and 20 percent overall respectively for each reader) could be reliably discriminated, it is concluded that handwriting would be of little value in a screening situation, where the rate of true positives is less than one percent.